Type News: Feral Lamb Chop
Someone find Shari Lewis, there’s a puppet prowling outside my window! While I wait for help to arrive, let’s stalk through this week’s news and new type. And in case you never hear from me again, we’ll start with something to remember me by.
Not only is Aerotype’s Keepsake a tattoo-inspired display face — it’s a tidy looking copperplate script in its own right. The five font flavours provide countless possibilities for layering and combining the engraved, shadow, drop, and filled variations. Each style is chock full of OpenType-powered whiz, including multiple alternates for each uppercase and lowercase character, optional “clip-on” flourishes, and other decorative elements. Designer Stephen Miggas has also built in a set of smart “apostrophe glyphs” to help avoid permanent punctuation disasters.
Fakt Slab is Thomas Thiemich’s third typeface for Belgium’s OurType foundry. It’s also a welcome serif’d partner for his previously released, dual personality sans — the obviously named Fakt. The two families work extremely well together, as they share a common set of proportions across a voluminous range of ten weights and three widths. Even though it follows in the tradition of archetypical slabs such as Memphis and Beton, Thiemich’s version sidesteps convention by including alternates that switch between geometric and humanistic forms, plus tosses in a set of “thoroughly resolved” italics.
When Stéphane Elbaz initially submitted his Geneo design to Typofonderie for consideration four years ago, the foundry was “immediately charmed” by the oldstyle-meets-slab aesthetic. Expanded from a single extra light cut into a TDC award-winning family, this attractive slab “on an oblique axis” is now available as a fully-realized, eighteen style collection.
The latest release from the Bureau des affaires typographiques (or ‘BAT’) foundry is Gilles Poplin and Jean-Baptiste Levée’s Synthese project. Its name infers the synthesis of attributes from classic sans serif faces that influenced the design (including name brands like Bauer’s Futura, Gill Sans Titling, Stempel’s Neuzeit Grotesk, Recta, and Plantin’s Mercator). This “rational and rigorous” grotesk goes from a text-friendly light weight to a beefy display ultra bold with vigor and respect.
Bold Monday presents Trio Grotesk as “a beautiful tribute to Dutch modern typography.” In the early bits of the 20th century, the multi-faceted Piet Zwart designed Kaart Antieke — a modern sans used specifically to set one of his essays. This soft, lightly extended typeface is the result of design Florian Schick enlarging and interpreting the tiny, 7pt original, while still maintaining the anomalous charm of letterpress printing. Three weights are included, each sporting seven types of figures, a series of arrows, and lighthearted regional dingbats.
A new type of type from TipoType? We’re good with that. Based on the name alone, you’d probably surmise that Fernando Díaz’s Logomotion is likely a typeface designed for logotypes — and you’d be right. But this graphically geometric, script-like hybrid has some fascinating potential as a designer’s playground — as well as a headline savvy display face.
Terminal Design’s Social is an “athletic” rounded sans based on work that James Montalbano produced for the LivingSocial logo and identity. His goal was to avoid the puffiness and “bloated” appearance of similarly styled families, even as the weights migrated to the heavier end of the scale. The family contains eight lightly condensed weights running from thin through heavy, with rather jaunty italics. This release also happens to be Montalbano’s first to incorporate Vietnamese language support.
What began as a “design and philosophical discourse” evolved into a collaboration between Joachim Müller-Lancé and Erik Adigard. The send result was Oktal Mono — a monospaced, modular, and thoroughly modernist display face with an underlying octagonal structure. Although it appears monolinear, a very subtle modulation is evident between the vertical and horizontal strokes.
And now, let’s gun it over to the news. No cop, no stop!
- Congratulations to Erik Marinovich, LetterCult’s 2011 Person of the Year.
- This looks like a worthy undertaking to back on Kickstarter: The Sign Painter Project.
- Twenty-Six Types is quite lovely.
- Oliver Reichenstein has been busy. He spoke at TYPO Berlin, and his firm, iA, has a redesigned website. He’s also exploring typeface design and responsive typography.
- Indra Kupferschmid shares her thoughts on responsive typography.
- Dan Reynolds has some sage advice about choosing a good text face.
- Meanwhile, Richard Rutter has created a body text tester for Fontdeck.
- Jeffrey Zeldman’s latest redesign has caused quite a stir. .net interviews him. Even Forbes has noticed.
- Tim Brown is working to produce his webfont specimens in their native medium.
- Creative Characters interviews Steve Matteson.
- Dan Cederholm is interviewed for The Great Discontent. (Nice shirt.)
- Yves Peters gets into onomatopoeia and Batman. Bam!
- Holy typefaces! Check out all these ones named after Greek gods.
- Get yourself a House Industries catalog collector bundle.
- Ken Lunde has all of the Unicodes.
- Font or typeface? Harrison Weber knows.
- Jeff Atwood writes about “The Eternal Lorem Ipsum.”
- Love or hate the London Olympics typeface, it’s not cool that it has been stolen.
- If you missed TYPO Berlin, five of the talks are available online. Make that seven
- Expand your vocabulary.
- Music packaging used to be amazing.
- Watch Epilogue: The Future of Print.
- Apparently there’s a special edition of Typeface: The Film on its way.
- Oh, who cares, I just want to watch “The Comic Sans Song.”
- Andrew Huff covers Pabst Oldstyle for Gapers Block.
- Meet the comma again for the first time.
Scheduling? Let us help you with that.
- “To Explore = to Love,” part of the “Types We Can Make” exhibit, takes place on May 31, in San Francisco.
- June 2, get yourself to Chicago’s wonderful Newberry Library for the annual Lieberman Lecture: Russell Maret on time, technology, and the shapes of letters.
- Also on June 2, go to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for No love. No happy.. (You might even be able to take in a double feature.)
- Luca Barcellona, Lucio Passerini, and Paul Shaw are putting on a “type intensive”, July 25–27, in Cornuda, Italy.
Finally, we’re sad to learn that Dan X. Solo has died.
See you next week.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for taming another week of new type!
Comments are closed on this entry.